Council for American Private Education (CAPE) is a coalition of national associations serving private schools K-12. "Outlook" is published monthly by CAPE. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Education Secretary Meets with Private School Leaders; (2) "Waiting for Superman" Sparks National Debate; (3) Neighborhood…

This paper refers to a dynamic perspective of educational effectiveness and improvement stressing the importance of using an evidence-based and theory-driven approach. Specifically, an approach to school improvement based on the dynamic model of educational effectiveness is offered. The recommended approach to school improvement gives emphasis to…

This paper illustrates the surplus value of multilevel exploratory factor analysis in educational effectiveness research. Educational researchers often use measures for process variables at the class or school level to explain differences in student outcomes. Recently, van de Vijver and Poortinga (2002) have developed a procedure for multilevel…

During the past year, Wisconsin state legislators debated a series of bills aimed at closing low-performing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. These proposals were particularly targeted at Milwaukee, the state's largest and poorest school district. Ultimately, the only legislation enacted was a bill that modestly…

This report portrays various performance indicators that are intended to facilitate an assessment of the postsecondary education system in South Dakota. Descriptive statistics are presented for South Dakota and five other comparison states as well as the nation. Comparison states were selected according to the degree of similarity of population…

This report portrays various performance indicators that are intended to facilitate an assessment of the postsecondary education system in Missouri. Descriptive statistics are presented for Missouri and five other comparison states as well as the nation. Comparison states were selected according to the degree of similarity of population…

In this paper, I analyze the behavior of public schools facing vouchers. The literature on the effect of voucher programs on public schools typically focuses on student and mean school scores. This paper tries to go inside the black box to investigate some of the ways in which schools facing the threat of vouchers in Florida behaved. Under the…

This multi-case study investigates characteristics and practices in schools that expand the traditional boundaries of school leadership and transform schools into democratic learning communities based on the level of implementation of the IDEALS framework. This investigation serves as a modus to illuminate democratic processes that change schools…

This paper uses time series data from a widely used assessment to identify colleges and universities that demonstrate positive trends on a range of educational effectiveness measures, describe observed patterns of improvement, and examine informants' accounts of factors that contributed to the improvements. This study informs broad questions about…

The literature contains extensive research that focuses on parent involvement and parent involvement programs. The past decade and a half has warranted some parent involvement programs that focused on the student populations of African American students and lower socioeconomic status students. In schools in which the African American student…

School choice policies are intended to provide students in poorly performing schools the option of transferring to a better school. The associated loss of funding to new competitors is expected, in turn, to benefit students who remain in their assigned schools by spurring improved performance among the educators in them. The prospects for such…

The poor U.S. standing on international tests is a product of unequal access to the kind of intellectually challenging learning they measure. While other nations have been expanding educational access to more and more of their people and revising curricula, instruction, and assessments to support the more complex knowledge and skills, the U.S. has…

This study replicated an earlier study conducted by Tarter and Hoy (2004) in which an open systems model was used to test a series of hypotheses that explained elements of school performance. Four internal system elements (structure, individual, culture, and politics) of the school were used to explain two sets of school outcomes (student…

There is persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more effective…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of importance that DuFour's nine characteristics of highly effective schools have on closing the academic achievement gap on the California High School Exit Exam, as perceived by high school principals. The study also examined the strategies believed to be most important in developing…